Until now, the Democrats don’t seem to have read the polls saying that the war is unpopular with the voters. Now, Lamont is here to wake ‘em up. You actually can win an election by being against the war. In fact, you can beat one of the most powerful people in the US Senate. Many strategic shifts will follow. Democratic office holders will move in the anti-war direction, and the ones who are running for reelection will improve their chances. Cracks may appear in the Republican ranks. Imagine a Republican who comes out against the war and beats a mealy mouthed Democrat as a result.

This is not to say that the Bush gang will change its direction. Those guys live way underground. The tides of public opinion don’t wash on their sands. They’ll keep going, "Bang, bang!" in the middle east until they leave office or get themselves arrested, but Lamont’s win could go a long way toward putting the Democrats in control of Congress next year despite the party’s best efforts to blow it. Lieberman will do his best to make sure the Democrats continue to blow it. He plans to keep running as an independent, split the Democratic votes and make sure the Republicans take over his seat in the Senate.

One other partisan political note: A Republican Congressman in Ohio, Bob Ney, quit his run for reelection because of his well-publicized connection to lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Hello John Doolittle. Don’t expect our own congressman to do the same, despite similar incrimination. Ours isn’t just a Republican district; it’s a district that would elect the Republican even if he was really an elephant.

It seems like a lot is going on with planning and land use issues in Grass Valley these days. The city council held a series of public meetings, supposedly to take public input on growth issues, but the polarization remains obvious. The slow growth people still think the people in office are in the pave-it-and-build-it camp, but a couple of recent decisions seems to show a degree of caution about development. Maybe the most important clue isn’t really a decision, just some idle talk. You’ll recall that four major, mixed use developments are in the planning stages around Grass Valley, including the high profile plans for Northstar and Loma Rica Ranch. A couple of city council members are saying that only one or two of those proposals is likely ever to be built. Once again, the city’s limited sewer capacity is cited as the factor keeping the developers at bay.

You’ve probably heard all about the soap opera leading to the closure of the Chevrolet dealership in the Glenbrook Basin. On the one hand, the closing of a business like that is not a good sign for the general state of the local economy, but it is an architectural eyesore in one of the most visible retail locations in town. Actually, it’s a perfect sight for a gas station, but enough of those already inhabit the neighborhood, so Walgreens is looking to move in, even though Longs and Rite Aid already live in the neighborhood selling the same stuff. The slow growth news is that the city planning commission didn’t like Walgreens’ proposed design and sent the developer back to the drawing board. Looks like Walgreens will have to be more sensitive to Gold Country design, you know, like Longs and Rite Aid.

Then you heard that Ralphs supermarket in the same neighborhood is skipping out of town in October. Don’t look for plywood on the windows, however, because Safeway is said to be moving in. That’s curious because Safeway bailed out of the Glenbrook Basin retail mix just a few years ago. I don’t know what all this means. It looks like mixed reviews for corporate chain stores. Some are bailing out while others are anxious to move in. This part of the world is on the cusp between rural and suburban. It may not be quite big enough, yet, to make a living running a store while sitting in a high rise office on the other side of the country.

Chamba covered it well yesterday, but I want a word or two about British Petroleum’s shutdown of a big pipeline in Alaska and subsequent announcement that gas pump prices in California would spike 20% as a result. The material Chamba read made two points: one was that, despite knowing better, BP failed to do the routine maintenance that would have prevented the shutdown, and the other was that BP’s profits will soar as a result of its apparent negligence. This story calls for a little more comment on the economic strategy. By reporting an old pipeline that’s rusting away and threatening to leak all over that fragile ecosystem, BP is buttering up its customers to accept unreasonable increases in prices and profits without protest. Not that consumers have any real power to stop the international dealers in petroleum products from charging whatever they want, but it shows that they still are committed to telling the charming lie that will keep the customer from screaming too loud. Right now, the only way to scream loud enough would be to revive that old slogan from the early days of the automobile, "Get a horse!," but I don’t imagine our transportation system is heading back to the blacksmith shop. The way to stop BP and the others, including the Bush gang, is to burn something in your wagon that isn’t derived from decomposed dinosaurs. Plenty of people are working on that, but they’ve got a lot of money working against them.

Two polls I read about in the mainstream press in the past few days have reaffirmed my belief that such polls are just amusing parlor games. One said that exactly 50% of Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein commanded weapons of mass destruction, and the other said that sexually explicit lyrics in popular songs actually cause teenagers to have sexual relations.